Svante Pääbo has been awarded the NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to the sequencing of ancient genomes, especially those from humans and extinct hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
said in a press release today
Christina Warinner, an ancient DNA researcher at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, adds that Pääbo’s career evolved over time, in tandem with the research. “Once you have the sequences, you have to stand back and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ That means taking a new approach, using new technology, essentially learning a whole new field.”
In 2008, Pääbo and his team recovered DNA from a finger bone fragment in a Siberian cave that revealed a previously unknown ancestral human population, now known as Denisovans. Here, too, the genetic results offered insights into modern human populations, revealing that adaptations to living at high altitude found in modern Tibetan populations may be derived from distant Denisovan ancestors.
“His Ph.D. work was on recovering DNA from mummies and it was pretty much a failure. He got nothing,” Stringer says. “Another kind of person might have said, ‘Well, I’m giving up, this is useless.’ But he didn’t. He kept going.”
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